#### Here are some texts you could choose for one of the [[assignments for essays]] (or to read just for your own enjoyment). [“Underrated ways to change the world” by Adam Mastroianni](https://www.experimental-history.com/p/underrated-ways-to-change-the-world) > This isn’t about writing, *per se,* but it’s a prime example of the work of one of my favorite writers on the internet as of this moment (I’m typing this in fall of 2025). Read it and then ask yourself, what makes you think “that was good” or “I want more” when you read an essay? For me, it’s when my reaction is “I hadn’t thought of it that way!” Or, perhaps even better, “I *had* thought of it that way, but I hadn’t even realized I was thinking of it that way!” [Here’s another good one by Mastroianni](https://www.experimental-history.com/p/use-this-magic-bullet-to-shoot-yourself). [“Why I Write” by George Orwell](https://orwell.ru/library/essays/wiw/english/e_wiw/) > George Orwell (1903-1950) (pen name for Eric Arthur Blair) — the famous English writer, is the author of ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ (also known as ‘1984’), ‘Animal Farm: A Fairy Story’ (or ‘Animal Farm’), ‘Homage to Catalonia’, ‘Down and Out in Paris and London’, ‘The road to Wigan Pier’, ‘Burmese Days’, ‘Keep the Aspidistra flying’, ‘A Clergyman's daughter’, ‘Coming Up for Air’.... Orwell was also a prolific essayist who produced such works as ‘Why I Write’, ‘Inside the Whale’, ‘The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius’, ‘Looking back on the Spanish War’, ‘Politics and the English Language’, ‘Notes on Nationalism’, ‘The Prevention of Literature’, ‘Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool’, ‘A Hanging’, ‘Shooting an Elephant’, ‘Charles Dickens’, ‘Marrakech’, ‘Literature and Totalitarianism’, ‘Writers and Leviathan’ in addition to many articles.... [“The Slow Death of the Power User”](https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/the-slow-death-of-the-power-user/) > This person is angry about some of the stuff I’m angry about! :) [“What I Think About LeBron Breaking My NBA Scoring Record” by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar](https://kareem.substack.com/p/what-i-think-about-lebron-breaking) > “Everything You Wanted to Know About LeBron and Me and the Scoring Record.” Just a great example of a powerful [[essay]] born out of an intense personal desire to work through something and communicate it clearly and warmly. [“Letter to a Young Poet” by Virginia Woolf](https://www.berfrois.com/2019/06/letter-to-a-young-poet/) > This is a letter [Virginia Woolf](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Woolf) sent to someone who had asked her if [[poetry]] was dead. Beautiful! [“Shirley Jackson and the Unsettled Mystery of Life” by Bill Ryan](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GKv5gnqmlFW9LphgKsS67yr1GyyM-ud1/view) > This is a good example of an essay about literature that is not limited to being merely about literature, if that makes sense. If you've ever been frustrated by having to write some kind of “literary analysis” without being given a compelling reason why, or if you've asked yourself *what does this have to do with real life,* you may enjoy this. [“Chairwork” by Scott Kellogg and Amanda Garcia Torres](https://aeon.co/essays/chairwork-invites-you-to-shift-perspective-on-who-you-are) > This is a fascinating essay written by a couple of psychotherapists. The main reason I'm including it here is that the concept they're talking about, it seems to me, could be extended beyond therapy into many aspects of life, including one’s writing practice. Consider it an invitation to imagine someone else’s [[point of view]], like, for real. Think about what that could do for your effectiveness and power as a writer! [How Martin Luther King, Jr. Wrote His Momentous “I Have a Dream” Speech](https://www.openculture.com/2021/11/how-martin-luther-king-jr-wrote-his-momentous-i-have-a-dream-speech-1963.html) > It’s a mentor-text essay about an essay that is a mentor text! “Riddled with big difficult terms and full of rhetorical devices that are intentional and practiced,” Puschak says, the speech eloquently explained “why fully 100 years after… the Emancipation Proclamation,” Black Americans were still politically disenfranchised and economically disadvantaged. It did so through a series of dense allusions to the Emancipation Proclamation, the country’s founding documents, the song “My Country ‘Tis of Thee,” and other artifacts of American national identity, in an attempt to “frame civil rights in the larger American mythology so that those who identify with that mythology might incorporate this struggle into that story.” [“The Age of the Essay”](http://paulgraham.com/essay.html) > This one really got me thinking, as a teacher, about what the word *essay* really means. [“First, I Cried. Then, I Rode My Bike.”](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OB1Yk1zwdliqCjpnvdLKH4WkWLPEq87X/view) > I love this essay by Jennifer Weiner about family, tradition, grief, exercise, and patterns in life. [“Pinning hope for the future on the next generation”](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KMGE0utpDSJEu1mgf04bbbpsLj0wbhwI/view?usp=sharing) > An uplifting piece by a columnist for the Saint Louis Post Dispatch. I like how it wraps bigger topics in with very personal, specific stories. Look at the structure and see how at the end it comes back around to where it started but with an expanded perspective. [“How to Say Nothing in Five Hundred Words”](https://drive.google.com/file/d/12b1zJmCbeOPCmjpbX5zjU5vpBR3Yyc6Y/view?usp=sharing) > How about a little entertaining advice on what *not* to do? “Paul McHenry Roberts (1917-1967) taught college English for over twenty years, first at San Jose State College and later at Cornell University. He wrote numerous books on linguistics, including Understanding Grammar (1954), Patterns of English (1956), and Understanding English (1958).” The advice given in this essay about essays is still maddeningly fresh. [“Who Is Steven Hotdog? Or, Untangling the ‘Braided Essay’”](https://magazine.catapult.co/dont-write-alone/stories/jess-zimmerman-personal-braided-essay-steven-hotdog-extended-metaphor) > A personal essay of the Steven Hotdog form needs the interior experience, the exterior fact, and the meaning that connects them—in order to work its magic. [“The Work You Do, the Person You Are”](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/06/05/the-work-you-do-the-person-you-are) > “All I had to do for the two dollars was clean Her house for a few hours after school. It was a beautiful house, too, with a plastic-covered sofa and chairs, wall-to-wall blue-and-white carpeting, a white enamel stove, a washing machine and a dryer—things that were common in Her neighborhood, absent in mine. In the middle of the war, She had butter, sugar, steaks, and seam-up-the-back stockings....” [“Pop Culture Has Become an Oligopoly”](https://experimentalhistory.substack.com/p/pop-culture-has-become-an-oligopoly) > “A cartel of superstars has conquered culture. How did it happen, and what should we do about it?” [“The Web is a Miracle”](https://werd.io/2022/the-web-is-a-miracle) > A public-minded developer, operating in a public service research institution, built an open knowledge-base with no eye on profit or even productizing it. Because of its openness and simplicity, it spread to other like-minded researchers, and then beyond. It wasn’t a product or a startup or a business, and nobody tried to build one around it until much later. [We don't know how the universe began...](http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2022/08/we-dont-know-how-universe-began-and-we.html) > “Did the universe come out of a black hole? Will the big bang repeat? Was the universe created from strings? Physicists have a lot of ideas about how the universe began, and I am constantly asked to comment on them. In this video I want to explain why you should not take these ideas seriously. Why not? That’s what we’ll talk about today.” [“The 10 Paradoxical Traits of Creative People, According to Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (RIP)”](https://www.openculture.com/2021/11/the-10-paradoxical-traits-of-creative-people-according-to-psychologist-mihaly-csikszentmihalyi-rip.html) ##### Places to find other well-written editorials or opinion-based essays - [eAchieve Library](https://docs.google.com/document/d/17JBI1hxhqYK9mmStbF4AKq20cB-JafZU65v0T9Cs9Eg/edit?usp=sharing) (recommended: the newspaper archives, the “issues and pro/con” category, the “social studies and issues” category) - websites of major publications such as the following: - [New York Times](https://www.nytimes.com/section/opinion/editorials) - [Los Angeles Times](https://www.latimes.com/topic/editorials) - [Washington Post](https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/) - [The Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/tone/editorials) - editorial/opinion section of a website of a local paper or publication (for personally relevant items that may not be discussed as much nationally/globally) - your local library, either in person or [through their website](https://www.cafelibraries.org/polaris/) - various other places on the web, like maybe [some of these](https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/8-great-places-find-articles-worth-reading-web/)